With all the hysteria in the media about Internet of Things (IOT) recently I thought it might be a good idea to initiate some discussion on some of the higher end items as the media seems to only focus on routers and items that no one has ever heard of.

On to my comments on the Ring Doorbell. I really like this doorbell. It was super easy to install and has been up and running for me for a few months to perfection. The hardware is designed well and seems to be robust. The camera has a fish-eye style lens and while it is a bit too much in my opinion, the implementation for this device is ok. The quality of the video is a tad bit bit low. Specifically – the resolution is fine, but the bitrate for 720p video seems very low — I assume this is to save battery life – which is rated at 1 year. If this is true, I will accept this trade-off as a matter of convenience.

I think the online storage is overpriced for the video storage. $30 annually to store the videos seems a bit high to me when I am already paying for online storage from dropbox, onedrive and google. I would like very much to either have local storage for the videos or to pay a smaller fee (say $5 per year) to store these videos on the provider of my choice.

My biggest complaint is that there is no easy way to just view the camera. The doorbell alerts me on my phone (and any other device) when there is motion or if someone pushes the button. These features work quite well and overall I am very happy with the doorbell.